Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Facebook shut down their XMPP service earlier this year and because of this, Pidgin/libpurple no longer supports Facebook Chat. For those of you who want to use Facebook Chat in Pidgin, there's a new plugin which makes this possible, called purple-facebook.

The plugin has been in development for about two months and is still a work in progress, but it is already functional and most things work as expected, including opening existing group chats and creating new ones.

According to its wiki, the Facebook Chat plugin is already implemented for the development version of libpurple, purple3, which has yet to be released and the purple-facebook project is a backport of the purple3 plugin to purple2, the released version of libpurple which is used by Pidgin and other clients.

The reasons for using this plugin instead of a stand-alone Facebook Chat alternative are having all the messaging protocols in one place and of course, the tight desktop integration provided by Pidgin, such as native desktop notifications, taskbar alerts, Unity Launcher unread count and Messaging Menu support (for the Unity features to work, make sure the Unity Integration plugin is enabled in Pidgin).

At the time I'm writing this article, the plugin doesn't support chat/friend additions or removals, but these are on the todo list. Some more advanced features like link previews or stickers are also not supported.

Install purple-facebook in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives

To install purple-facebook in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives, you can use its official repository. To add the repository and install the plugin, use the following commands: